Node-RED updated: The most excellent graphical UI for connecting the Internet of Things (or just things in general), Node-RED has been updated to version 0.6. The announcement notes the process of separating the admin and server authentication to make deployment more robust has begun. Node-RED has nodes that accept HTTP connections and has a HTTP admin front end and previously these were all under one HTTP authentication mechanism – now the UI and nodes are more separate with the option to set a user/password for each. There’s some UI changes like a search filter for the palette of available nodes and easier flow importing by just dragging and dropping JSON onto the UI. In the node-red-nodes library, they’ve added Postgres, Amazon DynamoDB and Emoncms for more connections. There’s also fixes for the MQTT keepalive handing, an added socket timeout settings for TCP sockets and support for all 17 pins of WiringPi. More generally, there’s a range generating node now and the inject node can send empty payloads if needed. Finally, the MongoDB node now can send a user name and password – something I found I needed when writing this for MongoHQ.

Hadoop 2.3.0 released: In case you missed it, version 2.3.0 of the Apache Hadoop project got a release. The release notes list all the details. The short version is this is mostly about HDFS, the distributed file system and the changes include the ability to class the storage under HDFS so you can make tradeoffs between say spinning media, SSDs and memory, an ability to explicitly cache files or directories under HDFS (and local zero-copy reading from the cache) and the use of HDFS and YARN to simplify deploying MapReduce code. Hortonworks has a good writeup which also looks forward to Hadoop 2.4.0 with HDFS ACLs and rolling upgrades.

NetBeans 8 gets an RC: The NetBeans IDE has hit release candidate for 8.0. This is the version that will include JDK 8 support in the editor, Java SE Embedded and Java ME Embedded support, PrimeFaces code generators, AngularJS navigation and code completion, PHP 5.5 support and much more. There’s a summary in the announcement, a lot more detail in the New and Noteworthy wiki page and a pencilled in release date of mid-April.

Skrollr scrolls in: Recently spotted – Skrollr, a compact parallax scrolling and scrolling animation library for all your Webtml5.0 styled sites including the ability to “scale, skew and rotate the sh** out of any element”.